


love has drawn red from my hands

by paperiuni



Series: Unwritten: Codas & Interludes [7]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Messy emotions, Post-Episode: s03e10 Erchomai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-03 18:09:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17882693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: He's a stranger in his skin and in his home.Magnus is not coping with the loss of his magic, Alec tries to help, and things get worse before they get better.(Set after episode 3.10.)





	love has drawn red from my hands

**Author's Note:**

> Joan and Jilly combed this over in draft and lifted me over the tar pits of self-doubt, and Ruth gave it a final lookover. I am ludicrously grateful.
> 
> Ashe organised the whole fabulous [3B Countdown](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/3B_Countdown) challenge, and excellent acknowledgments are due! Thank you so much for your patience, hard work and wrangling this thing together with style. ♥ And the beautiful banner, of course!
> 
> On that note: there is a trove of splendid fic in the collection, so go give the authors some love!
> 
> *
> 
>  **Content Note** : There is some emotionally complex/messy sex in this fic. Then they talk about it.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/) and twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen) If you want to live tweet, you can use #junefic as a hashtag.

*

There is a sense of wrongness in Magnus's mind like a splinter dug into flesh.

It's another night, much like the others. Another ramble along the streets of his beloved Brooklyn, with the wind blustering in the eaves and gnarling the trees. Alec is his faithful shadow, pacing his steps to Magnus's own, his collar up and his head bare. If it were a _normal_ night, Magnus would press his hands over Alec's ears and warm them with a wisp of magic.

"You look cold," he says, as they stop at a crosswalk. It's all he has. His hands remember but his blood is inert in his veins, the magic leached from it.

"I'm fine." Alec's fingers brush Magnus's sleeve, and Magnus could turn his hand and close the handhold. When he doesn't, Alec shifts away a fraction, without rancor or even regret. The futile tenderness in his eyes burns in Magnus's chest.

Their walks have the rigor of a ritual. Night after night, they chip away at Magnus's self-appointed research, dredging up forgotten lore and hoping to explain how his father took his magic away—and what it means for him now. The powers of greater demons are a challenge fit to wither the ambitions of the keenest occultist. Alec isn't much of a scholar, but he comes over like clockwork, picks up a book and scratch paper and continues where he left off yesterday.

Magnus has no answers. Only this brittle new existence dressed in the trappings of the life he knows.

He and Alec live out a strange, muted version of their relationship, where they meet, they cook, they read, as if things were perfectly normal. They collapse onto the couch for a movie and fall asleep tangled together. When they fuck, mostly late at night, too tired and tender to pretend, it is with a wordless, breathless intensity that aches as much as it soothes.

Depending on the day, Magnus either allows these routines wearily or relies on them desperately.

Inevitably it happens that exhaustion stalls them or a promising lead dries up. Leaving the loft then is an escape.

The city gives them a space too wide for despair to fill. While Magnus himself often needs to fill silence by any means, Alec has no such compulsion. He's happy to hum at Magnus's anecdotes or tarry over familiar sights, never asking to go back early, though Magnus knows his other duties run into the dozens.

Tonight Alec's patience rankles him. It's always like that now: they swerve chaotically between love and guilt, empathy and resentment. Magnus broke Lilith's spell at the cost of his magic and his immortality. How can Alec make amends for something that was Magnus's choice, and his alone? How can Magnus forgive himself the cost of saving half of Alec's soul?

He's known Alec since the spring. Half a year. A drop in the rushing river of an immortal life. A measurable fraction of a mortal one.

As they veer back toward the riverside, the wind pushes at their backs, pricking their cheeks with sleet. The pedestrian traffic thins around them. They walk abreast in the careless synch of people who are used to each other's gait, but tension fills Magnus like molten metal poured into a cast.

The first times they were out and about together, Alec would start at every skim of their fingers or hips or shoulders together. Once Magnus put a hand on Alec's back on a street corner and felt the touch jar up his spine like an electric spark, before his shoulders slowly loosened again.

Magnus held his palm there and thought, _I'd protect you if I could._ Laughed it off when Alec pointed out the face he'd made.

It seems like another life. Now there is the winter and the vain search for answers, the way his loved ones walk on eggshells around him, the forced cheer of their voices and the pity in their eyes when they think he doesn't see.

Some days he knows they do it out of love. They're all helpless before the problem that is him, so they treat him softly for fear that he'll splinter even further.

Other days, it burns like an inflamed wound.

Then, he wants to ignore Catarina's patient calls and Isabelle's texts about new leads she's found for his research, disdains the lunch invitations from Maryse and the sparsely worded messages from Raphael. Then, even Alec's presence becomes a nuisance, every kind touch and well-meant observation scraping him raw.

A tepid gust billows up from a subway entrance as they go past, clashing with the chilly air. Sodden leaves litter the sidewalk, soon to be trapped under forming rime as the nocturnal cold does its work.

"Left or right?" Alec asks.

_Home, or away?_

It's one more little binary that Magnus must decide on: Is he cracked or mending? At peace or railing against the inevitable? Does he tolerate Alec or is he so wretchedly, profoundly in love that he thinks it was all worth it in the end?

"Right." _Home._

Alec tries. Magnus knows how he tries. He hasn't fished for a single word out of Magnus. He never pushes. He simply stays at hand.

The power lines strung between the lamp-posts snap and thrum as the wind keeps rising. Flakes of sleet sweep down into the street. Magnus thinks they should hiss on contact with his skin and the hot, rigid tension under it.

The loft lies under a hush that hardly seems to lift as they enter, leaving damp tracks inside the door. Shoes and coats come off, and Alec slides Magnus's scarf solicitously onto the hanger rod to dry.

It's a casual gesture. No more remarkable than passing the salt at breakfast. Like Alec's unending patience is something Alec gives because he knows nothing else.

Magnus steps past the shadowed paintings and the books and papers corralled in the study nook, past Alec's sweater on the armchair that is Alec's now, a silent flag planted in the geography of Magnus's lair.

Warlocks have lairs. Magnus has a workroom full of ingredients going bad as the charms preserving them flicker out one by one. A library heaped with arcane texts in Chinese and Sanskrit, Latin and Chthonian, fit to be donated for all the good they do to him.

A crumbling shell of a sanctuary.

He could head to the kitchen, make coffee, put away dishes. Follow the routine of the night. Open a book for a couple more hours. Maybe, when it's late enough, press into Alec's arms and ask to be wanted.

He stops by a window. The sleet melts the view of the city into shivering runnels of ink and silver. Against the cold glass, his palm crackles with the phantoms of fire that'll never fill it again.

He's a stranger in his skin and in his home. The knowledge splits him like an axe blow.

Alec comes up behind him, soft on socked feet, and Magnus can't take another iota of his gentleness.

"Hey, do you—"

Magnus wheels to drag him down into a kiss, a half-violent crush of contact that smothers his question. Alec fumbles for his balance, one hand gripping Magnus's hip, the other planted on the window, as Magnus bites at his bottom lip. The shock of the kiss ripples in his rough inhalation.

"I don't," Magnus says, barely, before claiming his mouth again. Alec comes willingly, crowding Magnus in so his back hits the glass in an icy jolt. Alec, though, glows with solid heat, his mouth wet and open to Magnus.

"No, Alexander." Magnus tugs at Alec's shirt layers and feels his breath pulse under the rune-covered skin beneath. "I don't want to sit down with a cup of tea and a dusty book and hope for the best. I don't want to play house and pretend. I want—I want you to—"

That's more words than he's spent on his desires since he came back from Edom. He leaves them for Alec to intuit, because Alec is good at it, and understands a tiredly texted _not tonight_ as well as a gasp or a guiding nudge.

Alec only lets the end of Magnus's sentence trail for a moment before he marshals himself.

He presses Magnus's hand firmly to his own ribs, holds it there until the meaning is clear. "Just show me."

Magnus wrests the shirts off over Alec's head. The draft by the window raises a shiver along Alec's skin, and Magnus chases it with fingertip and tongue, then tugs a tightened nipple between his lips.

He's too on edge to linger. Unsteady with distraction, Alec fumbles at the buttons of his shirt in turn. Magnus takes his hand and pushes it down to his belt buckle instead.

Alec lets up a small, incredulous laugh. "You don't wanna go somewhere warmer? Or, uh, less visible?"

The window leaches the heat from Magnus's skin, a cool, greedy siphoning that does nothing to soothe the scathing, clawing want. On his other side, Alec is warm and eager and safe and falls ludicrously short of anything that would satisfy. "I want your hands on me," he says, hoarse. "Put me to the wall and fuck me—with your fingers, with your cock, it makes no difference. Take me until I can't think. Do you understand?"

Alec stops short. His cheek touches Magnus's temple, not a caress but a pause.

"I understand." His hand rises to span Magnus's throat, broad and sure, tilting his head back. "Take off your clothes."

His blood surges. His stripping is a hasty, clumsy affair, half pinned as he is by Alec's grip. The weight of Alec's hand anchors him, as if he's defined, encircled, knowable to himself again.

Alec has that effect on him. He quashes the unbearable fondness of the thought.

When he is done, Alec kisses him on the mouth with reverent purpose, like a man at devotions, a pilgrim kneeling to the saint he's come to see. Magnus feels another unwelcome pang of care, but lets him, and they share a second of stillness, mouths dark, eyes locked, bodies burning.

Snapping the pinion of that gaze, Alec turns him around and presses him to the window. His breath hisses out. Alec closes his teeth on the jut of his topmost vertebra, spans the curve of a scapula with his fingers. Magnus sets his brow against the rain-gouged glass.

This is his vantage point, hidden above. This is where he's always felt secure.

Alec follows the path of his own hand with biting kisses, and Magnus's exhalation paints a shuddering ghost on the window. Alec's palm at the small of his back holds him still. With a judicious rune, Alec could fortify that illusion of restraint into ironclad reality. He doesn't. It doesn't probably even cross his mind.

"No detours, if you'd be so kind." Magnus's voice roughens toward the end.

"Oh." A glimmer of confusion, before Alec says, "Okay."

"Should I spell this out? To an exacting degree?"

Alec swallows a sound, and it seems to go down with difficulty.

Then he slides down, a single fluid motion, falling to his knees and pulling Magnus's hips back.

"Wider," he says, low, in the timbre of voice that always hits Magnus like a kick in the knees. The restless glow under his skin flares into red heat.

Alec spreads him open and gives him the space of one wet kiss to settle into the feeling before Alec's tongue curls inside him. The short, sharp preamble wrenches the breath from his lungs; the deep, demanding licks hitch his whole body.

He bites into his knuckles and tastes the metal of a ring. His fingers grate against the window frame. Nothing else undoes him quite like this, and Alec knows it, knows that it makes him tremble like a plucked instrument and whites out the constant rush of his thoughts. He's hard, his cock an aching weight, but Alec merely works lingering circles over his hole, and the pleasure contracts low in his gut.

On a good day, he could come from this. Tonight the edges are too serrated, the knots in him wrung too tight. Alec, who knows his body nearly as well as his own, can surely tell.

He could accept Alec's hand and its familiar stroke. He could let Alec go slow, could let himself be tended and touched and cared for.

When Alec brings a spit-slickened fingertip to his throbbing rim, Magnus grits out, "Just get on with it."

He's ready, raw with need, heedless of anything but the thought of Alec at his back, inside him. There are few ways Magnus knows to forget. Sex at least gives a reprieve, a deluge of sensation to drown out the noise.

With a sigh, Alec stands up. Magnus can't stifle his own dismayed noise. "What?"

"I'm _not_ fucking you with spit and a prayer. Wait here."

Magnus throws his head back with a groan that may smack of melodrama. If he pushes himself upright, he may teeter to the floor. Alec's steps go to the bedroom with measured haste. Magnus wishes he could just sink into the anticipation that flows in full spate through his head. If he had his magic, it would be singing under his skin by now, thrumming in time with his desire. He closes his eyes.

Coming up behind him, Alec runs his knuckles down from Magnus's nape. Smooth and slow, the touch both wakes and dazes him.

"Here," Alec says. Only that.

Then he crooks his lubed fingers inside Magnus, a coaxing, merciless stroke that sends a quicksilver spill of pleasure shooting through his limbs. " _Alec_ ," he says, too ragged to carry the sound of command. "Come on."

"Yeah." Another brief, clipped word. Alec steers him to turn again, and lowers his head before Magnus can see his face. A rune gleams a dim gold on his arm. The image stays under Magnus's eyelids.

Things go hazy from there, like the city, a distorted dream under glass.

The chill of the window under his shoulders. His mouth dry with this dark, crooked desire. Alec's narrow hips tight with strain where Magnus's legs wrap around them.

His back slips and stops along the window as Alec fucks him, groping and shifting through different angles until Magnus smothers a shout and clenches around him. He digs his fingers into Alec's shoulder, claws at the slippery glass for purchase.

"Harder." It peters out into a plea. "Oh, just fuck me, damn you, I'm not _broken_ —"

The way Alec moves then is mostly a controlled collapse. He grabs Magnus and goes to his knees, tumbling them both onto the floor. The edge of a rug falls across his back, his heels knocking on bare floor before Alec bends his legs up at the knee.

Magnus's breath punches out of him. He'd scramble for Alec, for some kind of pinnacle, but all he seems able to grasp is the slick push of Alec's cock into him. Alec finds a deep, fevered pace, as his hand wraps around Magnus's cock at last.

Light bleeds around the edges of his vision as he glimpses, upside down, the ongoing rain, then the line of the wall, the shadowed shapes of the ceiling. Above him, Alec groans, the sound hoarse and strange. Magnus has no mind left for him, for anything but arching up onto his shoulders, his back lifting off the floor. His body fills with the reckless pulse of the orgasm, burning clean through his nerves.

It is a crush of feeling, a burst of hot blue behind his eyes. He squirms, unaware and unabashed, against Alec's grip. The little wailing sounds that stem from his throat go on for long trailing moments.

Reality settles around him like a dropped silk scarf, drifting on the descent. Touching his fingers to his own stomach, he feels his lungs work like a bellows. He's a sticky, boneless mess.

His mind is coolly, stunningly silent.

A buckle clinks. Something slaps softly on the floor. Outside noises. With drowsy detachment, Magnus looks at the scattered articles of his own clothing on the floor. The window must be rather a disaster. Alec's shirts are bunched up a little to the left, toward the coffee table.

Alec.

Magnus levers himself up to sit and meets a distinct lack of Alec anywhere in sight. The rest of his clothes are shed on the floor, after the fact. Only the hallway lamp is on, the living room in twilight. Water hisses in the bathroom, a second before the door shuts and cuts off the sound.

They've known each other since the spring. Been together for most of that time. Shared a bed since early summer.

In that time, Magnus can't remember not reaching for Alec first, in this same moment of blissful lassitude.

Until now.

The thing he nearly told Alec was, _I want you to hurt me_. It's a request Alec would never obey. Not intentionally. It's not even quite true, only a raw simplification of a twisted skein.

Pain was not needed. Pleasure worked as well as for his selfish, fleeting purposes.

Magnus covers his face with his hands, the smell of sex smeared into his skin, and blinks away the sudden tears.

Leaving the disarray of their clothing where it lies, he wanders to the guest bathroom. He runs the shower as hot as he can bear; a billow of steam trails out the open door when he emerges.

Of course, his clean clothes are in the walk-in closet off the bedroom, on the opposite side of the loft. There's no way Magnus won't meet Alec on the way. The small ironies of life always catch up to one.

As Magnus steps into the bedroom, Alec splays across the made bed, in plain sleep pants, his feet bare. His hair makes a dark, tangled saint's crown against the pale sheets. He doesn't look up.

Magnus hardly thinks himself a coward, but he goes and gets dressed first.

He knows, in rough strokes, how Alec works. He'll vent most unwanted emotions into physical activity. For such a gentle soul, he's ill at ease with receiving comfort. He's barely ever refused Magnus anything he's asked for—though Magnus used to take better care with his requests.

The runes on Alec's skin stand out, soft-edged, in the filtered light of a floor lamp. Magnus feels the faint aches of Alec's grip, the marks of his lips and teeth and fingers still on himself, and realizes that Alec does not feel the same. Magnus hardly touched him.

One of them has to open his mouth sooner or later. It might as well be him.

It should be him, and still the words clot together. "Do you want me to go?"

"Go where? You live here." Alec sounds horribly flat, but the way he emphasizes _live_ breaks the word like a wishbone. " _I_ should be the one asking that, shouldn't I?"

"You know you can come and go as you like." Magnus remembers the day he adjusted the wards to let Alec pass, and Alec's poorly concealed surprise and pleasure when Magnus told him he'd done so.

Cat has been reinforcing his wards. The magic shielding the loft is mainly hers now.

Alec sniffs, then swipes the back of his hand over his eyes. "You know. I wasn't—I haven't been pretending."

Magnus curls his fist shut, as if he could squeeze the fear that leaps in him into that tiny dark space. He feels rooted on the spot. Alec stares at the ceiling. The way he's sprawled on his back is wrenchingly exposed.

"I don't know what you need. You said you needed answers, so I'm trying to find them with you. But if it's not doing any good, if I'm not doing any good to you, then—" Alec falters.

"Of course you are," Magnus rasps out. It's not fair when he spent the evening half resenting Alec for all his unassuming constancy. How could he be so good, when all Magnus could seem to be was full of impotent regrets? "Not to mention that's hardly the point."

"You say that now." Alec rises, the bowed curve of his shoulder a feeble barrier between them. "I know we don't talk about it, not really. You gave up your magic and now it's this shadow over everything we do. Because you did it for me."

"The Queen of Edom was loose in the mortal world. I'd have done it even if I had no idea you even existed."

"Probably. But that's not how it is." Alec's fingers scrape at his cheek again. "You love me, and you—"

"Yes, I do." Whatever Alec was about to say, whatever barbed truth about loss and sacrifice, Magnus has already thought it. "And I know you return the sentiment. But that's my burden to bear. The weight of how dear you are to me." It's neither grand nor graceful, but this is something Alec will understand, even if it hurts him to do so. "I chose to let my father take my magic away. It's not your debt to repay."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Magnus grimaces. Then he goes across the room and sits on the bed with his ankles crossed, his knee pressing into Alec's leg.

"No. It is supposed to remind me that whatever I feel is my responsibility. The love I have for you. How lost and helpless I feel now. How angry and frustrated, at times."

"I can tell." Alec closes his eyes as Magnus reaches up to stroke away the wetness on his cheeks. "You're not always clear on what it is on any given day, though."

"I don't always know who I am, these days." This truth breaks off him like ice from a calving glacier, in a slow fracture followed by a sheer rushing plunge. "It may take me a long time to answer that." He wets his lips. "Alexander, the only thing I want from you is for you to be there with me. I don't need your penance. I just need your company."

Alec's throat works, and oh, it hasn't been this hard to look at his face since the time Magnus tried to leave him. He really ought not to repeat that occasion.

"Can I—" Alec fumbles at the loose sleeve of Magnus's shirt.

"Get a hug?" Magnus gets a gritty drop of humor into the question. "I could use one."

The thick, breathy laugh Alec gives might be the sweetest sound Magnus can remember hearing. He opens his arms, and Alec folds into them with a raw sort of trust that Magnus doesn't quite fathom, so he just buries his nose in Alec's hair and lets Alec cling to him.

Eventually, the angle of their bodies proves awkward. Magnus tips back onto the bed, nudging Alec with him. Alec stifles his gasp of surprise by curving his head under Magnus's chin. It's like he's too worn to fight the fact that—

—that he needs Magnus. Alec would scarcely say that aloud. It's sketched in the lines of his body, in the careful rhythm of his breath, like he wants to relax but can't quite follow through.

Magnus has to work up the will to break the silence.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I used you."

Humming in his throat, Alec peels away and resettles his head on his arm. "I know that. You didn't ask if it was okay, but I did want it. To distract you, anyway."

"I should have asked." Tonight was not only a bedroom game gone wrong. Not only Magnus being so caught up in himself that he forgot Alec's comfort.

"Yeah." Alec's words firm as he goes on, "And sometimes you decide to do something for me without asking, because you think I need it. Don't I get to do the same for you?"

"I should probably be cautious about saying yes to that. This time backfired rather magnificently."

"So we're talking about the sex now, not the bigger issue."

"The former is a symptom of the latter." Gallingly enough, Magnus feels like his head is clear for the first time in too long. He's turned in circles ever since he lost his magic, and outside those circles, the world has gone on. Alec shuttles between him and the Institute, where he and Jace and Isabelle are still sinking hours into searching for Clary.

"You can't give so much of yourself that it will fix this." As Magnus speaks, he cradles Alec's cheek in his palm, tentative until Alec tilts into it. "Or me."

Alec curls his mouth, somewhere between tender and dry. "You're not broken. You've changed. Those aren't the same thing."

"I do like that better." Magnus finds that his hand lies easy under the warm weight of Alec's head. If not at peace, then at rest. The frenetic energy that harrowed his every thought has faded.

"And," Alec says, "as long as you want to look for the how and why of that, I'm with you."

The movement as gentle as he can make it, Magnus bends his face to Alec's, but lets Alec close the last trembling inch separating them. The kiss is slow, more searching than sweet. Alec turns his head, draws Magnus in for a lingering second of open-mouthed contact, then breaks the kiss.

Magnus doesn't know how long it might take him to reach a conclusion. Maybe there is no answer to be found in all the buried lore of the world, no secret trove of knowledge or reclusive scholar that could make sense of him now.

Here, however, is someone who can, not with study but with stubborn love. Alec has no more answers than Magnus does, but he is a reason to keep trying.

"I'll take you up on that," he says, hushed. "But not before tomorrow."

"Mm-hm." A spark of whimsy lights in Alec's eyes. "You wanna go back to talking about how we kinda failed at sex, or what are we spending the rest of the night on?"

Magnus tries in vain to smother his laughter, then gives up. "I think, dear heart, that it's your turn to choose."

Alec tugs him close, and Magnus goes.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Twist In My Sobriety" by Tanita Tikaram.


End file.
